Category Archives: Houston Astros

There’s a new kid on the block, the result of a terrific website that literally outgrew itself. Jam-packed with over 400 audio clips and several thousand photo’s its popularity as an online baseball library continues to grow.

“Sounds of Baseball” is the dream of Steve Contursi, a teacher and non-apologetic baseball aficionado from Catskill, New York, and is the culmination of years of work on an archaic system of programming known as “coding”. It involved the ideas around what it could, should, and would be, and eventually ended up as an informative website that was like no other.

Most of the data on the website could be found somewhere else in the blogosphere, but it would have been a real challenge to find a website that contained all of this specific type of data in the same place.

This was and this is exactly what he did. Over time and with much patience, “Sounds” reached the level of top-rated baseball websites by the top search engines.

However, change was occurring fast in the internet world and with that came many challenges. A call was put out to the baseball community for someone to help with a transition to a more user-friendly website.

Along came Ronni Redmond of Santa Cruz, CA, a baseball blogger with a small amount of baseball knowledge, and not a lot of computer experience. But she wrote a decent blog, had an insatiable appetite for anything baseball and lots of chutzpah and opinions.

This is the new “Sounds of Baseball”. Its foundation is the original “Sounds” with a few little ditties thrown in and published in a Word Press format that’s much easier to maintain. The Site will be evolving as new material becomes available. Goodbye to coding and hello to the formation of an unlikely pairing of a fan of the New York Yankees and a fan of the SF Giants and all teams in-between.

We hope you’ll visit the site. So please grab a cup of coffee, pull up a chair, and turn up the volume.

“But the mainstay of the big leagues was the reservoir of 4-Fs – males of draft age who had been rejected on physical grounds by the Armed Forces. Not since harem attendants had gone out of style were men’s physical deficiencies so highly prized. Ulcers, hearing defects, and torn cartilages were coveted by team owners.” – Frank Graham, Jr. in Farewell to Heroes (1981)

Here’s a list of the 2014 salaries for the Major League Baseball teams. You can get a look at the individual player salaries from USA Today’s website. Individual rankings are interesting because you have to look past 65 players to get to the Royal’s top paid player, James Shields at #66. To find the highest paid “active” player on the Giants roster you’ll go to #29 for Tim Lineceum and further down to #89 for Buster Posey. But the real surprise was Madison Bumgarner who’s way down the list at #271. I’ll bet that’s going to change in the near future huh? Of course, you have to look at the total number of years in the individual contracts to see what the actual value is.

So the question is “Did they get what they paid for?” I’d say the Kansas City Royals management is feeling pretty good about themselves right now, ranking #18 out of 30 for highest salaries and still producing the top American League team in the nation.

Ethics and sportsmanship. Two of my favorite topics and my favorite blog dealing with the subject is “Ethics Alarms”. This isn’t a baseball blog, or even a sports blog for that matter, but I find myself quoting it often and I’m always able to learn from it. In this blog he talks about doing the right thing and what interested me most was, even if he hadn’t done the right thing, most fans would never have noticed. Chalk one up for another great article from Ethics Alarms’ Jack Marshall, ethicist, lawyer, and the president of ProEthics, Ltd., trying to keep us on the straight and narrow and reminding us there still is such a thing.

There was another baseball Ethics Hero who emerged on the last day of the regular season yesterday. File it under “Sportsmanship.”

Houston Astros secondbaseman Jose Altuve (at less than 5′ 5″, the shortest athlete in a major professional sport) began the day hitting .340, three points ahead of the Tigers’ Victor Martinez, who was at .337. Even with all the new stats and metrics showing that batting average alone is not the best measure of a baseball player’s offensive value, a league batting championship remains the most prestigious of individual titles, putting a player in the record books with the likes of Ty Cobb, Ted Williams, Rogers Hornsby, George Brett, Ichiro Suzuki and Tony Gwynn. It’s still a big deal. If Altuve didn’t play in Houston’s meaningless last game, Martinez would have to go 3-for-3 to pass him, giving the DH a narrow .3407 average compared with Altuve’s .3399. By…

I “Stumbled” on this great post that lists the origins of all 30 Major League Baseball Teams. It appears the Boston Red Sox hold the oldest named team dating back to the 1860’s, popularized by the Cincinnati Red Stockings from 1867-1870 and used by Boston’s National League franchise from 1871-1876.

But the actual team name origin that’s with the same team is the San Francisco Giants, formerly the New York Giants, that dates back to 1885.

Here’s the 2012 update to our 2011 listing published August 27, 2011. This comes to us compliments of USA Today. If you’ll click the individual teams, you can access the individual players salaries. It will be interesting to note the annual salaries of the teams that make the playoffs; in other words, did they get what they paid for?For example; the Washington Nationals have the best record in the Majors this year, but have the 11th Lowest Salary out of 30 Teams. Salary Chart Linked Here

I thought the World Series win would be the ultimate thrill for this San Francisco Giants fan. But tonight at AT&T Park, Matt Cain pitched the first perfect game in the history of the franchise, and believe you me, it’s got to be the best feeling in the world for any true-blue Giants fan.

Matt’s pitching was dead-on perfect all night, but It didn’t really hit me until around the seventh inning, that this was going to be something really, really special. It wasn’t just the pitching, but the Giants’ bats were hot all night and the incredible fielding, particularly in the 7th and the 9th innings, well all of it really, was spot-on. An incredible team effort.

When the ball hit Belt’s mitt for that final out in the ninth, I could hardly see what was happening as my emotions got the best of me. But I managed to see Buster Posey charge to the mound and physically lift the 6′ 3″, 235 pound Cain up and carry him probably 10 feet before everyone let their emotions rip. Matt said later that he trusted Buster’s calls all night, never questioned one, and just let it happen. Of course, every pitch he had was near perfect on this night, so between the two of them it was destined to happen.

Said Matt after the game, “It was an all out effort tonight and it turned out perfect. It was awesome!” Said Buster when asked if he was nervous, “I was as nervous as I’ve ever been on a baseball field. It’s a different kind of nervous, different from the World Series.”

As for me, I’m exhausted, stoked! Have to go watch that game again!! Thank you Matt Cain. This is almost better than the World Series!! Almost :)) Or as Chelsea Cain, Matt’s wife, expressed after the game, “This is insane!”

"The best possible thing in baseball is winning the World Series. The second best thing is losing the World Series." - Tommy Lasorda

"You teach me baseball and I’ll teach you relativity.... You will learn about relativity faster than I learn baseball." - Albert Einstein

"Baseball is a game of race, creed, and color. The race is to first base. The creed is the rules of the game. The color? Well, the home team wears white uniforms, and the visiting team wears gray."
Joe Garagiola

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DISCLAIMER

GARLICFRIESANDBASEBALL is written by a long-time fan who simply loves the game. I write my own articles (hence the grammar and occasional misspellings). If I include an article from another source, credit is given to that source and will include links when appropriate. The opinions are my own.